WCU Stories      March 19, 2019

Western Carolina University’s Free Enterprise Speaker Series will conclude for the semester with a discussion on race neutrality and ethnic economic disparity at 5 p.m. Wednesday, April 3, in Room 101 of the Forsyth Building.

The event, titled “Race Inequality: A Discussion with Steve Ha and Samuel Myers on Race Neutrality,” is free and open to the public.

Leading the discussion will be Ha, WCU economics professor, and Myers, professor of human relations and social justice at the University of Minnesota. They are co-authors of “Race Neutrality: Rationalizing Remedies to Racial Inequality,” a book about public policy, policy makers and racial gaps in wealth, business capital and unemployment.

"There's a compelling case that however attractive race-neutral remedies may be in resolving longstanding problems or racial economic inequality, these remedies often fail to address the underlying problems that give rise to the observed disparities," Ha said. "Using the framework of problem structuring from the modern policy analysis literature, the book shows that effective solutions to race-based policies need to be narrowly targeted to the underlying problem that the solutions are attempting to resolve."

With three events each semester, WCU’s Free Enterprise Speaker Series is a forum for the campus and community to explore various points of view on important issues of the day, hear from renowned experts from a variety of fields and understand multiple perspectives. For more information, contact Briton Bennett at csfe@wcu.edu.